Evaluation 4 - How Did You Use New Media Technologies in the Construction, Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages

Adobe Photoshop CS5- This was the main new technology/software that we used for our ancillary texts. It is very useful because of the high level of detail that you can put into the making of our posters and magazine front covers. It is also not too difficult to use however some tools may take a bit of practise or need to be played around with in order to understand how to use it fully. Photoshop allows the user to edit and refine certain aspects of our poster/magazine cover down to the point of 1 pixel. This is helpful as we can really get into detail with some of the parts and make it look like a real magazine cover or poster.

The main things I used in Photoshop for the making of my ancillary texts were the magnetic lasso, transformation and text.
 - The lasso was useful for cutting out the main image and implementing it into my ancillary texts.






 - Transformation simply allowed me to resize any part of anything and move it around to my liking. This was extremely useful when deciding how to lay everything out.

 - I used the text tool quite a lot as there is a lot of writing on both my poster and magazine cover. The access to many different fonts meant that I could make it look like a real poster or magazine cover which is key in this task. This tool also allowed me to resize the text fully to how I wanted it (height and width) and allowed me to have a neater layout.

We also used Photoshop to make our title and production company logo. The simple to use tools such as background eraser and transformation made it quick and easy to make both of these.

Fruity Loops Studio 10 (FL) - The music for our trailer was made with this software. It is a music software where you can make any type of music, as long as you know how to do it. We felt like this software is quite difficult to use so we had to watch many YouTube videos to get the hang of it.

An advantage of making our own music in oppose to getting it from somewhere is that we can make it exactly how we would like to and we timed it to our trailer. For example, every time there is a beat played, the shot changes. This would be very difficult to do with a pre-made sample of music.

We also let the music create the pace and dictate the tension in our trailer - The music starts off very slow and gradually builds up into a crescendo. We decided to make our trailer follow the same pattern - it starts off slow and the shots get faster and more intense as the music builds and speeds up.

Social media - Facebook, Snapchat - Social media is a great way to communicate with others and played a key role in terms of the planning of everything and also acted as a platform where people can suggest constructive criticism to see what needed changing.

Facebook - It is the social media platform with the most members out of any other social media. We took advantage of this and uploaded our trailer onto Facebook, and asked people if they could deliver feedback.  Having uploaded this on a very popular site, it allowed more people to view it, which lead to more constructive criticism in order to perfect our trailer.

Snapchat - This played a key role in terms of our communication. There were many times where we were not together when making certain things such as the music or specific edits within the trailer. Using Snapchat effectively allowed me to communicate with the person in my group in these situations. The app has heavy emphasis on sending pictures and videos, which was exactly what we needed to see the progression of editing and music and if anything needed to be changed when we were not together.

YouTube - We used this to upload things such as our pitch, different methods of planning and our first drafts, as well as evaluations. This played a key role in our research as we could find thriller trailers to analyse. There is also a very wide collection of trailers to watch so we could get an idea of a wide range of films.

Email - This was used to send things such as files, drafts and ideas to do with our trailer.